Digital Television (DTV) has gained increased popularity in recent years; more and more service providers transitioned, and/or are transitioning, from providing analog-based services to digital-based ones.
In most DTV services, the DTV receivers need to include “content protection” technologies, for example, Conditional Access Receiver, Digital Right Management (DRM) for copy-protection. To satisfy such need, a lot of operators provide their customers with set-top boxes that incorporate functionality to account for such content protection application. However, there has been a push toward moving away from such requirement for set-top box, and toward Digital Cable Ready (DCR) DTV. With the DCR DTV, the Digital TV set would simply plug into a cable jack, and thus the operator network, and would be able to function without set-top box.
In order to help smooth the transition to DTV for millions of users, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted “plug-and-play” rules to ensure that most cable systems are compatible with DTV receivers and related consumer electronics equipment. This is crucial toward building products, developing services and maintaining a market-friendly environment for HDTV. The cable plug-and-play rules are important to the DTV transition because they facilitate direct connection of digital navigation devices or customer premises equipment, such as Television receivers, set-top boxes, and digital recorders that are purchased from retail outlets to cable Television systems. These “plug-and-play” capabilities are generally aimed at promoting “integrated” DTV products, that is, Digital TV sets that may run without use of actual set-top box. The users may simply plug such integrated Digital TV set into their cable jack and, using a security module, called CableCard, provided by the cable operator, receive DTV programming and related services. From a security point of view, CableCard removes the conditional access of the DTV programming and re-scramble the programming by using a standard copy-protection mechanism.
While the use of CableCard permits forgoing of use of physical set-top boxes, it also has draw backs of its own. CableCard devices are generally expensive, and the burden of costs would have to be borne by either the providers or the customers. Furthermore, the CableCard solution is inflexible because providers would require different and unique CableCard devices that is specifically configured to these providers' content protection technologies. Therefore, whenever a customer changes providers, or even in some situations where a provider may change their content protection technologies, the CableCard devices in current use may need to be replaced. Other approaches to satisfy the FCC's “plug-and-play” rules are considered because of the potential limitations and issues related to use of CableCard.
One new approach is to develop a downloadable conditional access (CA) function (DCAS) as described in <http://www.opencable.com/dcas/> by major US cable operators. DCAS proposes a cost-effective, network-agnostic solution for interactive two-way devices that connect to cable systems, allowing cable operators to download their conditional access (CA) function(s) of choice to devices connected to the cable network. However, DCAS also has its limitations. Because DCAS is aimed at allowing cable providers to change content protection technologies, a considerable control by the cable-operator at the head-end side would be requires. In other words, the product using the DCAS must be configured to work specifically with a specific cable-operator. Therefore, while the DCAS may be ideal for products that still use set-top boxes, it may not be practical for “integrated” Digital TV sets because it would require these sets to be designed specifically to conform to a certain set of content protection technologies. In other words, DCAS requires very restricted production processes which are specified by the cable industry, and these processes may not be suitable to the DTV production process because DTV manufacturers may not want to have their DTV SoC be limited by specific cable provider.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.